Rowers ready to hit water at Green Lake

GORDY HOL, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By GORDY HOLT, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Monday, August 7, 2006

Heidi Dietrich, 27, works out on Green Lake in preparation for this week's USRowing Masters National Championships. Dietrich, who started rowing in high school, will compete in at least three events this week.
Photo: PAUL JOSEPH BROWN/P-I

Heidi Dietrich, 27, works out on Green Lake in preparation for this...

Stephanie Duncan, 54, takes off from the dock of the Pocock Rowing Center in Seattle for a morning workout in her single scull. She has more than two dozen national gold medals -- and five world golds.
Photo: PAUL JOSEPH BROWN/P-I

There isn't a rower over 40 who wouldn't agree that youth is wasted on the young. But Heidi Dietrich, just 27, wouldn't agree.

As she prepares for the four-day USRowing Masters National Championships on Green Lake starting Thursday, this writer for the Puget Sound Business Journal knows whom to salute.

"These old guys, they're amazing," she said. "They're depressing, in fact. I can be racing people my mother's age, and they'll beat me every time because they've been rowing all their lives and have the technique. It makes all the difference."

Dietrich's bracket is sometimes an awkward bracket to fill. The very best, the elite still fresh from success in collegiate ranks, often remain in the hunt for national team and Olympic recognition.

Moreover, it is an awkward age, when young families and careers are being formed and the early dawn schedule of rowing's training day is tough to meet.

But Dietrich is hanging in there.

A tennis player who was introduced to rowing while attending Shorewood High School in Shoreline, Dietrich returned to the sport at Green Lake after college and has stayed with it. As a two-fisted sculling specialist, she intends to compete for the Green Lake Rowing Club in at least three Masters events for women in the 27- to 34-year-old age bracket.

That means she gets to stay clear of more-seasoned athletes -- Stephanie Duncan, 54, of Seattle, for example, a Conibear Rowing Club standout who turned to rowing from a medal-seeking career in triathlons.

"She can beat me, easily, in a single scull," Dietrich said. "She's amazing, really good. And competitive. Funny about rowing. It seems to attract type- A people, the ultracompetitive personality. But not me. Not to that extent."

Duncan, indeed, is a gold-seeking missile and is quick to admit it. She has the evidence.

Since 1995, Duncan has amassed "around" 28 national gold medals -- and five world golds.

"It's not fun for me until I can put a medal around my neck," she said. "For me, it's all a matter of mental toughness and commitment. When I commit, it's 100 percent. I was that way as a triathlete. If I'm going to race, I'm going for gold."

How many others are also afloat across the country remains unknown. However, where barely more than a handful of rowing clubs existed in this state two decades ago, no fewer than 16 club and nine college and high-school programs now take advantage of the Seattle area's water profile. And there are 15 more clubs from Port Townsend south to Chehalis.

Rowing historians point to women in rowing as far back as the early 1800s. But it was not until 1976 and the Montreal Summer Games that they got an Olympic invitation.

Here in the early 1980s, it was the late Husky crew coach Dick Erickson who helped change the equation by giving rowing lessons to "mature" yacht-club women.

The outcome was a highly competitive group of 12 masters-class female rowers who, bucking the dictums of a rising women's liberation movement, called themselves "Dick's Chicks."

Seattle has never quite seen the likes of the flotilla coming to town this week, estimated at approaching 2,000 rowers. To a man and woman, they are the grown-ups of sport. Their age-group classes range from Dietrich's 27 to "75 and up."

Among the "and ups" are Burk Ketcham of Tacoma, 81, who didn't start rowing competitively until his early 70s, and Charley McIntyre of Seattle, 83, a native Philadelphian who grew up with his behind in a boat.

With bypass surgery behind him and missing a cancerous collarbone, McIntyre still teaches the sport in Portage Bay on Lake Union.

This week he'll join an eight-man sweeps boat from the East Coast.

He'll also row a doubles sculls event with Helen Manley, 60, of Seattle. Together, as rowing rules allow, they will create an average boat age that will slot into the 70-74 age group.

"This is one of the few endeavors in life where you try to be older than you really are," Newman said.

That's as true for the 81- year-old Ketcham as it soon will be for Heidi Dietrich as she continues to compete and age.

But there are limits, said Ketcham, who works out in a double scull that requires a partner. "Frankly," he said. "sometimes I'm happy when someone calls up and says, 'I can't make it today.' "

He was 72 when he first sat in a racing shell, and didn't become a rower until he was in his middle 60s back in Boston after losing his wife to cancer.

Following a friend to the Head of the Charles River race, he said, "I remember sitting on the (river's) Harvard side, watching the shells go by, and saying to myself, 'I think I'd rather be rowing than watching.' "

Not long after that, he bought an Alden ocean rower -- wider and not as long as a singles shell, and more stable for a novice. He was hooked.

Then, one day, "I reduced my life to a rowing machine and that Alden on top of my car," and he headed west.

Athletes who row are among society's earliest risers. Come rain or shine, light or dark, their determined feet hit the floor each morning in time to get their boats into the water by 6 a.m. These long, narrow and tippy vessels are divided into "sweeps" and "sculls." The terms define whether you grab one oar (sweep) or two (scull).

Like Dietrich, Duncan and McIntyre, Ketcham grabs two. He is a sculler. But he won't be oldest on hand this week.